Beam (Gen 2) disorted / metallic sound w/ TV (eARC) and Night Sound Mode

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S
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This clip will reproduce the sound. You can search 'Superman Game Unreal Engine' in YouTube on the TV. It was uploaded by TJATOMICA.

 

Turn the volume up and listen for the city sounds at the start of the video when the Superman character is on the ground. It sound like the city noise is out of phase or low bitrate. 

I recommend doing it with just the TVs and the beams on their own, without the sub or surrounds. A few posts online have said the issue disappears when surrounds are added. 

 

K
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No further comments till now but Support asked me to test with the opical connection instead of HDMI (ARC).

Which I have not done till now. Maybe you can post your results of this test here, too? Mine will probably follow tomorrow.

That said, I can second what you said: The distortion is especially “evident” where there is clapping in the background.
However, silent scenes with a specific / clear and simple audio allow to capture it much more accurately.

When outmost speakers mean the “rear” channel, that could back the theory of bogous processing… as for me it is mostly evident in 2.0 channel audio, which by definition should not have any “rear”.

 

Airgetlam

This is, ultimately, a community site, if you want to communicate directly with Sonos, you might be better off if you were to call Sonos Support directly to discuss it.

Bruce
K
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Well I can try again indeed, already did twice this in the past though. 
 

To be honest I am a bit tired of going through the regular „did you try turning it off and on again“ kind of procedures… 

 

I’ll get myself a motivational speech and try again I guess.

K
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Ok, new case opened: 04346661

S
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I don’t think the forum moderators are looped in on what the programming team is doing, and certainly we community members are not. 

Honestly, if you were to call in to one of the companies that I’ve worked with programming teams on, we would not have ever told you that we were working on something or not. There is always too much potential for a misunderstanding, from whether it could be resolved, to how long it would take to figure out, then how long to rewrite the code (and how much needed to be rewritten, just how pervasive in the codebase was it? Bugs are rarely one or two line fixes), then the whole QA process, then the beta testing process….and anywhere along the line is the possibility that the ‘fix’ didn’t work in the way that was expected, and has to go back to the beginning for reevaluation. And at some point, there’s the opportunity for some management type to say ‘this bug isn’t impacting more than a handful, and we can make more money by focusing our resources somewhere else’….

None of that data would ever be shared publicly, for what I hope are obvious reasons. 

Your best bet, to have your complaint heard and passed on, is to call in to customer support, preferably with a diagnostic number handy, so that they can pass your ‘real world case with data’ on to the team. 

I understand all this, but if you roll the clock back 2 years or so you can see the Arc was having a similar problem https://en.community.sonos.com/home-theater-228993/sonos-arc-metallic-sound-6843110#post16450184

 

A product manager at Sonos was on here and communicating with the community regarding the issue. I'm not sure about the OP but I've been in contact with Sonos support numerous times since this issue started. I've sent audio clips of the issue, they've taken diagnostics data and I've gotten an RMA. When you've been through all the official channels you start to get desperate. 

S
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No further comments till now but Support asked me to test with the opical connection instead of HDMI (ARC).

Which I have not done till now. Maybe you can post your results of this test here, too? Mine will probably follow tomorrow.

That said, I can second what you said: The distortion is especially “evident” where there is clapping in the background.
However, silent scenes with a specific / clear and simple audio allow to capture it much more accurately.

When outmost speakers mean the “rear” channel, that could back the theory of bogous processing… as for me it is mostly evident in 2.0 channel audio, which by definition should not have any “rear”.

 

I've tested the optical adapter before. No change. 

K
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Shnakey, as you seem to experience the exact same Issue that I have, do you have any specific source you can reproduce it? Till now I have only had German Live TV exposing this behaviour.

Ideally we have a Nexflix / Prime movie / specific audio channel that always exhibits this distortion. But I have not been able to identify till now.

 

K

@Eriksatie haved you tried setting the height to -10? Does it sound worse than 0?

S
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Shnakey, as you seem to experience the exact same Issue that I have, do you have any specific source you can reproduce it? Till now I have only had German Live TV exposing this behaviour.

Ideally we have a Nexflix / Prime movie / specific audio channel that always exhibits this distortion. But I have not been able to identify till now.

 

I have it on all sources, apps etc. I also experience it with 2.1, 5.1 and Atmos content. It happens anytime there is surround sound effects, crowd noise and the likes.

E
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@Eriksatie haved you tried setting the height to -10? Does it sound worse than 0?

Yes I’ve tried, there’s little difference to 0 but probably can be different if you test another movie (or maybe another room?). Also don’t wanna lose all the verticality (the effect is so small even at +8). I think that everyone should find his sweet spot. Zero seems to be a nice start point and definitely sounds better then +8, at least to my ears

K
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OK. Is it more prominent for you also when you enable “Night Sound” ?

And just to double check - when you say “all sources”, you mean input anyway from TV (either HDMI or Optical), but all sorts of audio encodings, is that correct?

 

S
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OK. Is it more prominent for you also when you enable “Night Sound” ?

And just to double check - when you say “all sources”, you mean input anyway from TV (either HDMI or Optical), but all sorts of audio encodings, is that correct?

 

Haven't noticed night sound making it any worse. I get the metallic sound on all audio coming from the TV through the Beam, regardless of source or encoding. 

K
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New unit received, installed, updated, … works flawless, BUT: Still I have the same issue.

We can conclude, this is not a one-off error.

Next round with support. Seems a follow-up case-number was created for the RMA 

 

Moderator Note: Removed identifying information

 

K
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Update: i made my  way through support and there is no other way now as to RMA the unit.

 

I asked to keep the case open as to continue in case the new unit exposes the same behavior.

K
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I have done some more analysis.

For me it seems to be best (only?) reproducible using

  • Night Sound mode “ON”
  • a TV channel that sends PCM 2.0 format (never reproduced it with e.g. 5.1 or Athmos)
  • preferrably a TV program with an audio track that has no background music (which is covering the phenomenon)

I have an audio recording [1] of the phenomenon. Sadly it is not as clearly noticable on the recording as it is IRL. I suspec the mobile phone noise cancellation is getting in my way. Nevertheless. The first 20s of the audio you can head a metallic sound in the background, sound a bit like metallic rain, then after second 20 I disabled night sound (leaving the TV on the same channel) and the effect did go away.

On that channel I was able to reliable reproduce it. I did:

change TV channel back and forth → Issue always reappeared on this specific TV channel

Power cycling sonos → still there

Disable Night Sound → issue not noticable / not there

Re-enable Night Sound → Issue there again.

 

Issue exists with Panasonic and LG TV, so I assume its not the TVs fault.

 

[1]

https://file.io/uETDsjjaaXwP

Ken_Griffiths

I have done some more analysis.

For me it seems to be best (only?) reproducible using

  • Night Sound mode “ON”
  • a TV channel that sends PCM 2.0 format (never reproduced it with e.g. 5.1 or Athmos)
  • preferrably a TV program with an audio track that has no background music (which is covering the phenomenon)

I have an audio recording [1] of the phenomenon. Sadly it is not as clearly noticable on the recording as it is IRL. I suspec the mobile phone noise cancellation is getting in my way. Nevertheless. The first 20s of the audio you can head a metallic sound in the background, sound a bit like metallic rain, then after second 20 I disabled night sound (leaving the TV on the same channel) and the effect did go away.

On that channel I was able to reliable reproduce it. I did:

change TV channel back and forth → Issue always reappeared on this specific TV channel

Power cycling sonos → still there

Disable Night Sound → issue not noticable / not there

Re-enable Night Sound → Issue there again.

 

Issue exists with Panasonic and LG TV, so I assume its not the TVs fault.

 

[1]

https://file.io/uETDsjjaaXwP

The link says ‘file has been deleted’ FYI.

E
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Dear Erik,

 

it is indeed very interesting that this does not happen with rears. It proves that it is some upmixing going wrong.

 

That said, I do not second your conclusion that nothing can be done here. For one, if it does not happen with rears also on stereo, that means stereo is upmixed to multi-channel also.

This is also in line with the my experience that the metallic sound is coming from the sidewards pointing speakers. These are probably the speakers used to create „3D“. So for heavens sake, don’t use them on stereo!

This upmixing of stereo is a feature completely useless and could be disabled altogether IMO.

 

Also, upmixing for multi-channel - if played without rears - may be something people want to disable, if the inevitable (is it really??) result would be metallic sound.

 

So the solution is simple, give us an option to disable upmixing (use of sidewards pointing speakers) -or- refrain from doing it in situations like stereo content.

 

Cheers

I’m just giving a theory here, but my impression is that it happens when the front and the rears are slightly different in timing, for example when the rear is slightly delayed. This is a very common technique used in audio mixing to give a sense of space. Can be used also in stereo tracks. You take the left signal, delay20-40 ms and send it to the right speaker. This gives you a “fake stereo” sound. This can be done also on 5.1 setup: you take the LR signal, delay it, send to rears and you have a “fake surround” signal. This is done by audio engineers that mix the audio of the film, not by Sonos speakers.

 

this trick works, but only if you use different speakers for the delayed signal. If you sum up the two signal in one speaker you are going to get a metallic/phasing sound and you can’t do anything about it. I have a background as a mixing engineer in music field and I’ve mixed a lot of music (stereo) tracks. When you are mixing in stereo you have to be careful about mono compatibility. The “fake stereo” I had explained before is something that can create problem for mono compatibility. In the same way, if you applied that trick to a 5.1 you can have problem with system that are not really 5.1 but try to emulate that (for example soundbars).

I might be wrong, I don’t have experience in 5.1 mix, but this explanation make sense to me and my knowledge

Ken_Griffiths

I would perhaps try to capture the sound in a mobile video recording and also submit a diagnostic report when you next encounter the issue. Note the diagnostic reference and then call/chat to Sonos Support Staff via this LINK and see what they may recommend/suggest.

I’ve got the Beam (gen2) here in our Dining Room, but can’t say I’ve ever come across the issue. Maybe try it either with another TV, if you are in a position to do that easily, or perhaps just try a different HDMI cable to try to see if that may eliminate the issue.

Anyhow, I hope you can get the matter resolved.

S
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I'll try and record some samples over the weekend and report back. 

Ken_Griffiths

Hi Ken,

would be great if you could try to reproduce it.

That said, I am glad I can say that it is in no way similar to that song nor reproducible using Cher.

For a moment I was really afraid I that I would have to listen to it over and over again. ;-)

 

I think Elton John’s farewell Show on Disney+ is what Benny mentioned earlier in this conversation.

As I do not have Disney+, I cannot confirm from my end but will look for something on Amazon or NetFlix.

 

Also, I have posted a link to an actual recording of the issue here.

 

But in general, anything with a crowd in the background seems a good choice. For me the effect is most audible when enabling “night sound” in scenes with low overall volume/density and a crowd (e.g. background clapping or chatting). It is clearly coming from the two outwards pointing speakers on the Beam.


It only seems to happen with audio input from the TV.

 

Will let you know as soon as I have identified a sample to reproduce from my side.

 

I don’t use Disney+ either, but I haven’t noticed it whilst watching the World Cup football - would that be a good option to listen to the crowd, perhaps🤔? I’m still not exactly sure what to listen-out for, but in fairness I have been watching things here with the surrounds and Sub enabled.

I will try the posted YouTube video after the Wife has finished watching her programmes (Coronation Street etc.) but that’s going to just be in PCM stereo anyway, I assume? (does that matter?) ..and I’ll see if I notice anything. I will post back later.

Oh, and I will switch the surrounds and Sub off too and Trueplay aswell.

Ken_Griffiths

During the advert break, the Wife let me do a first initial test (see screenshots taken - merged) - my first reaction was just how much I would definitely miss Surrounds and even more-so the Sub audio output.

So I cast the posted YT video to my TV YouTube App and just to say this is the first test with the Sonos Arc - I will do the Beam (gen2) a little later.

I can’t say I’m noticing an issue - I switched off surrounds/sub and tried it with Trueplay on and off. (Better sound with it ‘on’ in my case).

I replayed the video (especially the beginning several times) and sounds like a recording of background traffic - I didn’t notice a metallic sound at all - I later played the video on an iPad Pro in stereo (where the screenshots were taken/merged) and that sounded similar to what I was hearing on the Arc but just not as good/loud as the Arc (obviously)

So this was just my first initial test and my initial thoughts.

Could really do with more/better examples than game-playback on YouTube perhaps?

But no metallic-like sound noticed at this point.

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Ken_Griffiths

I'll try and record some samples over the weekend and report back. 

Just perhaps point to some samples on Prime Movies, Netflix etc (with approx. times) as I’m still struggling to reproduce the issue here.

Ken_Griffiths

Similar testing done to my post above, but using the Beam (gen2) and same YT video - (screenshots attached again).

Again I did the same testing, but went the extra mile by toggling on/off ‘night-sound’ and ‘speech enhancement’ aswell as Trueplay …and even toggled off/on the surrounds and sub.

It still sounds the same to me - I just can’t even think what the metallic sound would be that you’re hearing, but I get that the background traffic/noise on that YT video is not brilliant - I tried a few other YT videos too.

So I’m not hearing/noticing the issue, or anything unusual, that would have perhaps come to my attention.

I still think some better video examples might perhaps help and again I’m happy to test those too. 

Note that YT video sounds the same/similar on my Beam as when I listen to it both on my iPad speakers or via headphones connected to the iPad. So I’m not noticing anything unusual coming from the standalone Beam.

Send me a suggestion of another video source to test - ideally Netflix, or Amazon Movies and perhaps others with a Beam will chime in here and help test these things too.

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K
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Re-uploaded here:

http://sndup.net/bd4b

 

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